NY Has Officially Lost It's Mind Bitch
 

It’s a Female Dog, or Worse. Or Endearing. And Illegal?

free. speech.

or the beginning of the end of it. Now every damn group with their own little BS catch phrase or word that they don't like is gonna start lobbying for it to be banned. Total BS Eff 'em all - bitches.

If I saw her on the street I would HAVE to say "Nigga' you a' bitch".

Oh that's just silly. Individual words shouldn't be banned.

I hate that in my country it is actually a breach of the peace to say 'fuck' in public. It's a hangup from the Victorians. Very, very rarely acted upon. But I do recall one time a guy got fined £50 for swearing on the street.

OMG... FUCK THAT!!!
& it is NOT for the chillin'!

If they can't ban it will they require it be spayed?

Hahahahaha

If you say that, you better make sure they know which spelling you're using.

Definitely up there -- or down there -- with that band of concerned citizens who browbeat a city administration into firing an employee who publicly characterized some undesirable as "niggardly." These incompetents were certain it was a racial slur and would hear no different. Some mules are just made for two-by-fours.

Please tell me that's a joke...

In a way, yes it is a joke. A joke on people so incompetent with a dictionary that they were willing, all unawares, to declare it in public.

A Good Article on this and other instances of people being about as smart as PeTA was about the upstate NY town of Fish Kill.

Fishkill, Catskill, Peekskill, ... very popular name up there... Kill means creek, which lends a certain humor to John Romero's [of ID/Ion Storm (in-)famy] wife Killcreek.

Yeah...that's a bit like that poor bloody Paediatrician that got hounded by righteous parents.

:lol: Although, my local paper (the Daily Mistake) once advertised spade bagel puppies.

Reminds me of a particularly bruising sign I once saw posted in the unclassified bit of a NavSecGru building, the sense of which was "your suggestions will help a lot." The poor bustard who wrote it found himself hung upon the horns of a dilemma in Homonym Hell:

He wrote it Y O U apostrophe R.

Dear God, they let this niblick graduate from high school??

English Nazis are alive and prolific. Irrelevant was the author's point. His spelling error created no confusion or distortion. But English Nazis, like Religion Police, must protect us from ourselves. Screw the purpose of his sentence. Crucify him anyway. Clearly he must be a false prophet! Consider the source when asking for relevance.

Why would anyone attack "the poor bustard" over a silly apostrophe? And what relevance does that accusation have to NYC and the word 'bitch'? Well both are about making personal attacks. One would ban intentional insults using the word ‘bitch’. The other endorses insults justified by the political agenda of English Nazis.

Why so much personal hate and mockery because of a misplaced apostrophe?

Reminds me of one of my all-time favorites from www.overheardinnewyork.com:

That's true, and wouldn't give me much pause, in a hand written note or board post.
It does jar me, however, when a professionally made sign contains errors like that. It indicates a lack of professionalism that makes me wonder whether the message is actually what the person that commissioned the sign intended.

I've told this one before, but i'll tell it again cause it sticks in my mind:

A beautifully 'chalked' blackboard sign, wth border decoration and little pictures of wine glasses and popping corks and this message, artfully drawn with delightful little serifs:

"Christmas bookings now bean taken"

How bout the COVER of Mainline JulyAugust 2007 (in the Philly area)

DISAPPEARING ACT
Is the Main Line vanishing underour watch?
Of course the picture on the front is an attractive woman in a bikini with the placement of the "underour" about hip high.

This magazine claims to be an Arts, Culture and Lifestyle Magazine

That would be the free slick magazine with the advertising for the high-end businesses you can't afford to drive past, much less go into?

I get the Montgomery County version.

On a cover, more often than not the problem is actually one of bad kerning, the space is there, but it's not balanced the same as the rest of the text. You got picture?

I think you are talking about Lifestyle Magazine. This is the one that recently was in a lawsuit with Mainline today over the name. I have the mag at work, but our new scanner doesn't get installed till Monday - will see what I can do then.

On a trip deep inside a General Motors 'machine cavern', I noticed a sign on the elevator spelled it "employees". I asked the union guy who finally corrected its spelling. That (and all other signs in GM) spelled it "employes". He told me that Roger Smith has resigned as chairman two days ago. GM in days was changing all signs and all forms to the correct spelling. Because Roger Smith spelled it "employes", then all signs, forms, etc had to be changed to "employes".

Try competence with one's native language.

Clearly this is something you are not equipped mentally to appreciate.

This, tw, is a contemptible and acutely ignorant point of view -- not an unusual thing from you. You display no more respect for the English language -- at which you are by no means superbly skilled, either from deficient schooling or because English isn't your first language, your style in it being at once voluble and erratic -- than you do for American patriotism, to which you are actively hostile. If the prospect of an American win can keep you unresponsive to a simple, direct question as to whether you'd want it, why are you still within U.S. borders? I've asked you that four or five times now, and the question seems to hang you on the horns of a dilemma: Do you want America to win the war?

Do not seek to argue with -- nor try for an advantage over -- me concerning the English language, unless you are as deeply masochistic as your other unattractive personal traits are deeply ingrained. All your talent, it seems, is confined to electrical engineering, leaving a conspicuous want of them in the languages. You just never did have any people smarts or political acumen, did you?

Why do you care so much Urbane?

I don't think it's contemptible to want to see in others' writings, what they intended rather than wilfully disparage it simply for a misplaced apostrophe. Actually, apostrophes are one of the more difficult concepts in the English language to grasp. Many, many people who are otherwise perfectly competant at communicating in both verbal and written arena, and whose vocabulary is just as extended as either yours or mine, have difficulty with the correct usage of apostrophes. There are one or two very specific usages of the possessive apostrophe that I have to think carefully about and I used to teach the language.
There is a reason we have the phenomenon of the Greengrocer's apostrophe.

Someone needs to tell that Bitch Council woman to sit down and shut the hell up. :D

They should also tell her to untwist her panties.

Because he can't argue the point, he resorts to a, "Hey, look a birdie" move.

On the other hand, he can hold down a steady job, and you sell knives in a pyramid scam. There's a lot to be said for the marketability of one's skills.

Ooohhh ouch.

Hooowah! Low blow. I like it.

Someone in Colorado had their bar closed down because of the customers' use of profanity on the premises. The state now owns it. If they don't like your customers there, they will close up the whole shop for just about anything. Profanity was the only thing they could catch the owner and patrons on....at first.
A local coffee shop (I was there nearly every day) also almost got hit with this but the owners agreed to actually having a formal investigation done of their regular customers as to not get their business taken away. I was actually there for that part. People cussed, smoked, and talked politics outside the doors of the place- and were investigated by local law enforcement whilst chatting before or after work at their local hangout.
Colorado has already completely lost it's mind bitch. Fuck Bush.
If they find you doing something illegal on a prime piece of real estate-like cussing in public- the owner might get the place confiscated and given to the state.
It was a couple years back and I'm trying to remember the name of the law they came up with to do all that with- I guess I'll have to get back to it. Here it is, a short article- It was closed down and the owner was investigated and arrested later.

Colorado: State, tavern reach agreement over profanity
Colorado has reached an agreement with a tavern owner who was threatened with the loss of his liquor license for permitting profanity in his establishment. The state will quit threatening tavern owners with that penalty, and the owner of Leonard's Bar II in Colorado Springs will withdraw his civil rights complaint under the plan. Department of Revenue spokeswoman Dorothy Dalquist said July 6 the state decided to stop enforcing the profanity regulation because it is antiquated. A state agent had seized 29 signs, 21 of which included the "f" word, from Leonard Carlo's bar on Aug. 31, citing the now-abandoned 1979 regulation prohibiting profanity in bars. Associated Press

If we couldn't use profanity my office would completely shut down.

In fact, I had trouble typing this without inserting at least four uses of the word "fuckin'."

So if I understand this correctly in Colorado it's conservative authoritarian wackos who don't like profanity and in NYC it's liberal authoritarian wackos who don't like profanity. Is that right?

's just authoritarian wackos

I agree with you - that is bullshit, but don't blame Bush - he had nothing to do with it.

Why do you ask? I respect my mother tongue and use her properly. Incompetence isn't good, and incompetence this elementary is unbecoming an adult human. Don't ask again: this is my answer and it's a good one.

I do not and did not find it so; indeed, apostrophes as used on this side of the pond are among written English's most systematic and logical usages. I had these mastered before I left elementary school. Surely, if I can manage it, without flaws...

I took the liberty of amending your spelling -- and yes, it takes me some memory-scouring and in some extremities the dictionary to remember if it's -ant or -ent -- the -ent is "one-who-does-something" most of the time but not all. (A careful course in phonics early on helps a great deal.) We can blame it on not having an English equivalent of the Academie Francaise. (Diacriticals omitted; this BBS does not cooperate with ASCII-coding them in. Try it only if you'd like to see which surprise page you end up on.)

I simply know those specific usages -- and I do give thought to what are somewhat gray areas, such as pluralizing abbreviations, where one can argue that an apostrophe there is standing in for those letters not included in the abbreviation. This usage has the virtue of not effecting an alteration of the abbreviation. Too, if one is quite uncomfortable with adding the tadpole, abbreviation in uppercase and the pluralizing -s in lower is still an option.

A reason as infamous as its examples are widespread -- they were asleep in fourth-form English class.

Competence is good. More competence is better, and it is hardly unreasonable to expect it.

We do not use a pyramid structure, nor multilevel marketing -- we reckon MLM unethical and reject it.

There is often confusion in plural possessive, when the plural is not formed by the addition of 's', such as: men's or mens' ?

What I was trying to explain Urbane, is that there is a difference between competently using language in its spoken form and having the same degree of competence in written language. One is a natural skill, which the brain is set-up to acquire in the same way we are set up to learn to walk, and the other...isn't. Some people will have more aptitude for the nuances of written language than others. It is a skill which some have learned well, others poorly, some exceptionally... the idea that they are somehow less than you, or less respectful of their spoken tongue than you, because they did not acquire the same nuanced understanding as you did of apostrophe use and the derivation of words, is arrogant.

The language came first... we then invented ways of expressing it that tried to fit it into an entirely different grammatical structure(Latin). Written language is an invention...its structures are the arbitrary decisions of long dead men, in much the same way that the bible is. Fortunately, these days, grammar is now taught in a very different way to linguistics and communication students.

K. I'll get off my horse now about the Latin thing. Its a bugbear of mine.

Not everyone places/ed as much emphasis as you have on producing written language that can hold up to scrutiny. Most people, and I put myself in this latter group, seek merely to make themselves understood. They may, like me, have a feel for the way words run together and how they sound when spoken aloud. They may just wish to present the information, stage by stage, until their point is made. They may...if writing a sign, just want to convey simple information.

Now, I'll laugh with everyone else at the obvious gaffs and as an ex-literacy tutor I have a fairly large store of 'em in my memory. But making judgements about a person from their writing skills, beyond the extent to which they've learned a skill, is not something I would be inclined to do.

Your caring so much about getting the written version of the language right, does not make you better, nor does it make your words weigh more.

Yeah, it don't make him no smarter any.

Wat he said

1.) Do you, or do you not, have the ability as a sales rep to "recruit" other sales reps?
2.) Do you, or do you not, receive a commission when someone you have recruited makes a sale?

I'll give you fair warning, a simple Google search has already answered these questions many times over.


More importantly, I don't really care if it is an MLM, or if you are genuinely successful at it. If so, great. My post was really just a gentle reminder that if you choose to be a dick to other people and make personal insults, you may expect people to do the same to you.

1) Not as a rep -- but as a manager. Reps do not have other reps working under them, nor is Vector Marketing structured that way. There is a "we'll reward you if you bring in somebody who succeeds" program, which kicks in after he succeeds at a certain level, but he's in no way under you. He, like you, is another independent contractor with Vector. You don't manage him unless and until you become his District Manager or something, and he for some reason does not become a manager. There is always the possibility that he could, as Vector is a growing company.

The emphasis, though, is on reps doing the job of moving the excellent product we sell -- we go up against fine brands of kitchen knives like Wusthof, Sabatier, and JA Henckels every day and we outsell all of them in the United States, and only Henckel outgrosses us worldwide. That is the thing we're here to do, and not to recruit a swarm of sub-reps like vampires' chyldes. The money's not in that, but in doing our jobs in people's kitchens, making their lives better than they once were.

2) Managers get their pay according to a rather detailed formula of varying percentages of the sales the reps in their offices make. This does not come out of the reps' commissions but out of the overall profit markup on the product. The formula is weighted to encourage the manager to do his main job, which is to recruit new sales reps and to train them. The manager succeeds when his reps do, and in all cases the rep receives the bulk of the commission, so it's designed to everyone's advantage from the newest new guy to the senior manager that runs the regional Pilot Office to make sure the new guy is trained in the best, most effective techniques of sales and of service, to follow up. This has the effect of the most successful manager being the one who has recruited a large officeful of sales reps, and then devotes all his effort to increasing their skill and keeping them enthused by any ethical means at his disposal. Competitions, awards, bennies, and "bucking them up whenever they are glum," which also happens -- salesmen really only sell when they are enthused.

The Branch and District manager's job is recruitment and training, and we endlessly pursue the best training -- and since what is best gradually evolves either from creativity or changing conditions, it is well to stay current. The managers get a good deal of training and dissemination of current info too. A great many Branch and District managers reduce their personal selling during the primary recruit/training season, which is the summer to give more time to their primary job.

Calling the fact that we have managers a "pyramid scheme" does violence to the definition of pyramid scheme. That we have office managers to recruit and train, and to pipeline orders to headquarters in Olean NY is not a pyramid anything, but the company's information-handling structure, if you want to be rather abstract about it. The flow of information goes both ways; orders in and commissions and recognition -- we do a lot of recognition because we are about nothing if not positive motivation -- out. Calling this structure a pyramid scheme is more the blather of persons allergic to sales and marketing than a factual description. Marketing can be learned, and one expert at it can thrive, but too it does call for a certain personality type -- generally a right-brained individual who is willing to take some risks and who can invent it as he goes along.

I like Vector because it's a no-bullshit outfit. The corporate culture figures there isn't time for it -- what there is time for is ethics. I have invariably been treated properly and according to my deserts.

That's the word from the inside.

There is, but the knowledgeable -- the adequately trained, if you like -- do not suffer from it. Men's is the correct usage: the plural is indicated in the vowel mutation and the apostrophe goes before the S because there is no need to stack plural formation on plural formation; cf. English's avoidance of the double negative. The apostrophe may be taken to stand for the missing possessive pronouns like his, hers, theirs -- "the men-theirs."

I had this cold by elementary school. What's the others' story?

Which point didn't actually get made then, but it is true.

There was no understanding, nuanced or otherwise, to that example at all, which is why I remember it so vividly and why I'm so thoroughly appalled even today -- the error was too elementary for an adult's powers. I did not achieve my quality of written English through either exceptional genius nor magic. If anything, it was being trained by people who got it -- and could teach others to get it also.

I agree: it was quite the misapplication, wasn't it, to insist that you shouldn't end an English sentence a preposition with. Up with this we should not put. (Anyone who wants to imagine Churchill making Yoda sounds is free to.)

I'm afraid this amounts to a plea for incompetence, which I reject at the nonce and always shall and will. Arbitrarily. :p

As do I.

Another plea for incompetence? All right, why?

Like leaving off the final E of gaffe and substituting for this a hooked snagger of fish and bales, or several of them -- though we'd agree that were we to get ourselves mixed up with the pointy parts of one or more gaffs, they would be about as obvious to us as anything is likely to get. Colo(u)rful too. And difficult to bear.

In my experience poor writing and muddled communication are so often associated with poor thinking that that is the way to bet. I am not afraid of making judgements; not the way some would like us to be -- that these some may be preserved from the social consequences of gaffes, or the general understanding that some people's ideas are just not very good. Political correctness is a form of intellectual tyranny towards that very end.

If you insist. As for me, I beg to differ, and I can make it felt. Or sandpaper.

Language can become art rather than engineering -- I'm good at the art end, and can follow the engineering.

Well, THIS is a chuckle.
 

Hmm. See above, Bruce. You can pretend I can't argue the point, but everyone will see you pretending.

And if you're going to expose yourself that thoroughly, you might want to consider... hmm, tattoos.

It's funny that, because when I read you, I read a person with excellent grammar skills, a top-notch vocabulary... and terrible communication abilities.

It's hard, because every one of us will read each other differently. But I always read you as trying to impress everyone with flowery prose. For me, it totally obscures whatever you were writing about at the time. More UG prose to slug through? Long sentences to decode, $1000 words where $1 words would do? What a pain in the ass, I'll bypass this post and nothing will be lost.

The shorthand I read in you is "I'm correct, because I'm very smart." Here you make that very point. And this annoys me; because the biggest lesson I have learned in my life is that my high intelligence and good education are great tools to have, but they entitle me to exactly jack shit.

No, you aren't correct merely because you're very smart. No, you aren't correct because you can write well. Don't you see all the people who are very smart and who can write well, who are making massive errors all the time?

(edit: I'm sure there are folks who read my stuff and think I'm doing the same thing. It's hard, because every one of us will read each other differently...)

Thanks Undertoad. You make the point very eloquently.

To underline it: you can tell little, if anything, abbout a person from their competence (or lack thereof) in written English.

Not everyone's experience of education is the same and not everybody's natural inclinations suit the teaching styles that have been used with them. Not everyone has the same natural aptitudes. I know, from my work that there are many adults for whom these seemingly simple concepts are in fact very difficult to grasp. One of the most intelligent people I have ever met came into my class with written skills more appropriate to a six year old.



Really? I only had that in the last few years. In fact, I didn't fully understand the plural possessive apostrophe until I studied for my level 3 Adult Lit support quals. Care to reach some conclusions about me, my intelligence, my attention levels, or my school experience, from that?

No, it amounts to [pointing out to you that you are over concerned with something others may consider trivial. When I write a degree level essay, I take the time to make sure that it is grammatically correct and contains no spelling errors. Some of that (most) comes naturally, some requires a little more thought and on occasion I have sought more information about certain types of puntuation or an unusual spelling. Here? On the forums? I don't. I am amongst friends and am having a written 'conversation'.

Well done, you spotted a typo. This must mean you are superspecial.

Well done. You have found an instance where latinate grammar fits our language. *applauds*. English is a hybrid language, it contains both germanic and latinate roots. Some of the rules of Latin apply, some don't.

e.g. To go boldly where no man has gone before.
To boldly go where no man has gone before.

Spoken English allows both those sentence structures. Indeed, the second sentence (which by latinate grammar would be considered incorrect) has more resonance and power and is therefore more suited to its purpose than the 'correct' sentence.

There are two types of 'grammar'. There is the 'grammar' which our language naturally has. It is born of the human brain's inherent understanding of grammar and the organic development of a living language. Then there is the 'grammar' we've been talking about in this thread. That 'grammar' is something which describes our language. It is a tool to understand language. At a time when learned men in England were attempting to nail the language down (and describe it fully), they utilised Latin grammar, as Latin grammer was a) written down and codified by the Romans and therefore was an obvious base to draw from and b) deeply fashionable. These days, linguistics students are taught grammar in a very different way.

Very good. Me too. Not everyone is (or wants to be ) an artist or an engineer. This does not make them lesser people.

They have become so alike it's really hard to tell Rich. But yes- at that time it was all the good god-fearing conservative wacko samaritans. It's so Orwellian out there and there is no good way to describe it to the extent it deserves.
I only said "Fuck Bush" because that was the exact terminology thrown around in many of those Colorado "crimes" under investigation. (btw) Don't worry- I don't even get my humor sometimes- too personal and dark.
Really they were just hunting down property (cars and houses too) and if profanity is illegal, well- find some criminals at any local coffee shop or bar. Someone in either of those places can have too much and let it loose. Oh and they did. I'm not sure why they wouldn't cuss. A lot.........
Before I left they were monitoring certain neighborhoods for domestic violence and they could confiscate your property then too.

And there's something that couldn't possibly be open to abuse...

As far as I'm concerned, they should have banned the 'b' word when the rap song came out saying 'B-----es ain't sh-t but h--es and tricks'. Now that too many knuckleheads are adopting the same lifestyle as that blasted song, the banning comes too little too late.

Banning words doesn't solve anything. Ideas will be passed even if they have to make up words to do it. Censorship solves nothing.

I agree with Bruce. These songs are not the problem, but just exposing it.

As I said, I don't think the problem lies with the misogynist songs, but the fact that teenagers of both sexes will buy into it and think that this is a "cool" or acceptable lifestyle. It shows that our society still has many misogynist tenancies and embraces extreme gender stereotypes.

Sounds about like Colorado Springs. The religious wackos in that area are appalling.

There should be a law against where you're in the movie theater and somebody goes "shhh" and you go "it" ...

And you'd lose out thereby. I'm complex, but I'm worth it. Long or short, I impress. Angering the troglodytic -- because of what they are -- is simply part of the deal. I also anger the philistine, both at the start and in the follow-on, the conflict there being that they wish to stay philistines, and I don't think they should. This part of the ruckus is my screed against philistinism in the language.

Of course not; I seek out the correct, and then write well about it.

And I hit them on it about as often as anyone, when I understand their error.

Most of all I think its your out and out modesty that impresses me UG.

The humblest of the proud, the proudest of the humble
 

My humility is greater than your humility!

Shall we continue the satire for another six or seven posts, or have we really done enough? :D

It's not the heat, it's the humility, that's so oppressive.